United States
In the U.S. landscaping industry, which continues growing at a 3-5% compounded-annual-growth-rate clip, the grass is always green. And because roughly 85% of the 650,000+ American landscaping companies are small, with 4 or fewer employees, it remains highly fragmented and underserved by tailored SaaS software—creating good opportunities for ISVs in this space.
While the work of landscaping is quite labor intensive, the billing and payments workflows are, ideally, hands-off. Like other property-related industries such as janitorial services and site maintenance, landscaping is a business that often involves minimal client contact. Whether commercial or residential, once the initial agreement is in place, services such as lawn care, plant maintenance, irrigation maintenance, pest control, and hardscape maintenance are typically recurring. Grounds crews show up weekly, biweekly, or monthly to do the work, and the landscaping company bills accordingly. The more automated the billing and receivables, the better.
In addition to this core work, landscaping companies also provide one-time or ad-hoc services, such as landscaping design and installation, fall clean-up, irrigation system design and installation, curb appeal refreshes, sod installation, and more. Landscapers may bill for these services or collect payment in person on the day-of-service, creating an additional accounts receivables path.
Regardless of their services mix, most landscaping companies operate with tight schedules, remote crews, and limited back-office support. Delays in invoicing or payment collection can create friction—and lost revenue. The right payment-collection experience, on the other hand, reduces those delays, builds customer trust, and gets landscapers paid faster.
If you’re an ISV developing software for landscaping companies, your payment integration must meet all of these needs seamlessly and simply. From electronic invoicing and branded payment portals to automated recurring billing and versatile payment types, you need a payments partner that provides the full range of card-present and card-not-present solutions to satisfy every landscaper need.
Payroc helps ISVs support landscaping companies with recurring payment tools, versatile payment acceptance, fast funding, mobile payments, and more.
Recurring Billing as an Industry Mainstay
Because recurring services are the bread and butter for most landscaping companies, effective automated recurring billing is essential. Look for a payments integration that delivers billing tools that reflect real-world landscaping workflows:
- Payment links and customizable payment portals—Via email or text, landscaping companies can automate invoices that contain payment links or QR codes. Their customers simply click to pay or to set up recurring payments.
- Autopay, with card-on-file, account updater, and automated retry logic to keep revenue predictable.
- Installment billing tools for larger projects, such as new landscaping installs, that enable deposits and milestone payments.
- Automated reminders, statements, and more
Mobile Payments for Ad-Hoc Services
While recurring billing generates the lion’s share of landscaping business revenue, ad-hoc in-the-field invoicing and payments (tipping, too!) are also an important consideration for some companies and circumstances. Your payment solution must also offer:
- Tap-to-pay at the jobsite, allowing crews to accept cards or mobile wallets with their mobile phones in the field
- Mobile-friendly hosted payment links and QR codes, enabling crews to send invoices via text or email with one-click hosted payment fields or mobile-optimized payment requests via text or email, letting customers pay from their phones—no apps or terminals required
- Field-friendly payment devices—Precertified, fast-to-deploy, and easy to use, with smart terminal SDKs or mobile reader APIs
Versatile Payment Acceptance
In the landscaping industry, commercial clients will typically choose to pay with ACH, and residential clients may prefer to pay with credit cards. So your payments integration needs the flexibility to welcome all payment types, including:
- ACH/bank transfers
- Credit and debit cards, including Level II and Level III processing for larger commercial clients
- Stored, tokenized card data for recurring billing
- Digital wallets for online payment portals and for tap-to-pay in-person payments
Fast and Transparent Funding
Cash flow is a major concern for landscaping firms, especially during peak seasons, when outflows can easily exceed inflows if receivables lag. As you’re vetting payments partners, look for:
- Quick, predictable payouts, next-day or same-day
- Easy access to funding status
- Clear and fair fee breakdowns
Integrated Reporting and Reconciliation
Landscaping company owners typically want to track payment flow without leaving your software. Through robust APIs, your payments integration can help you provide:
- Daily deposit reports (per client and per crew)
- Automated reconciliations tying payments to work orders or invoices.
- Multi-location or multi-crew accounting
Support and onboarding
Landscaping companies are often not tech-focused. With the right payments integration, your software can help the payments experience be simple and frictionless. Strongly consider a payments partner that offers:
- Cobranded or embedded merchant onboarding flow
- Dedicated partner support
- Minimal underwriting friction
Compliance and Risk Handling
The right payments partner will remove compliance from your scope and shoulder the burden of compliance.
- PCI DSS Level 1 compliance with tokenization
- Fraud tools and chargeback support
- Support for mobile crews and dynamic IP locations
Payroc—Your Payments Landscape Partner
Ask around and you’ll see why Payroc is the payments platform built for partners. With deep experience in the field services industries, we provide plug-and-play payments setups for landscaping software ISVs as well as fully customized solutions. We offer modern, well-documented APIs; scalable, cloud-based architecture; sandbox/test environments for fast dev cycles; and much more.
To learn more about our integrated payments solutions, reach out today.